ISB and a collaborative team of researchers looked at hexokinase-2, or HK2, a key enzyme in glucose metabolism. "A set of previous reports from our collaborator Dr. Herschman (co-author of the paper) and others revealed that cancer cells often rely on HK2 to elevate glucose metabolism to fuel their uncontrolled growth, making this enzyme a desirable target for testing," said ISB Assistant Professor Dr. Wei Wei, the lead corresponding author of the paper. Conventional CTC detection methods, as exemplified by the FDA-cleared CellSearch system, normally rely on the use of a family of proteins called cytokeratins (CKs) that are typically found in epithelial tissues. As roughly 90 percent of human cancers arise in epithelial tissues and express CKs, these methods work very well in many major cancer types. However, their performance in NSCLC is suboptimal, despite the highly aggressive nature of NSCLC, which represents a long-standing puzzle in this field.